Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

This is one of the big things—the member for Barker would be in exactly the same boat—that defines regional people from people in capital cities.

It can be dramatic if there's an accident. The other day I was coming along a road, and I noticed there was a lady, a young girl and a guy—a wild-looking bloke—on the road. They were just standing around. I was trying to work out what was going on, and as I came slowly around I saw a car had gone off the road. I stopped and I said, 'Who was in the car?' They went, 'They're still in there.' We got them out and walked them up to the edge of the road, but it was very close to them dying. The issue was we had no phone service. There was no phone service. It was about an hour and a half to two hours before an ambulance turned up. That was just one day, driving back up from the coast.

We've had other examples, like when a bushfire breaks out. When the fire goes, you've got to move really quickly to try and deal with it. We all have to deal with that in regional areas. But people are having to drive kilometres up the road to get phone service so they can ring the bushfire brigade and also start to organise amongst themselves—because in country areas people organise their own section of the bushfire brigade. But to contact people you've got to be able to phone them. We also have UHFs. At our place, it's channel 41. But, if you don't know what the UHF is and the other person doesn't have UHF on, then you can't contact them. Five, 10 and 15 minutes is huge when you're trying to deal with a fire. It's absolutely massive. It all comes down to us having a reliable phone system, and we don't.

We've had a petition in our area from Cropper Creek, Cooletai, Gravesend, North Star, Warialda, Bingara and Upper Horton—some of these are coming into New England. They're fed up with trying to operate their business, security and lifestyle without a phone that works. Just recently I went to the cafe at Gravesend, which is coming into the electorate of New England, and the big issue that people wanted to talk to us about is that they don't have a mobile phone system. To be quite frank, many areas have just given up on fixed lines. They don't even bother to maintain them anymore. It's antiquated technology. A lot of local people say, 'We can't rely on Telstra. We're going to have to look at Starlink and go with the new forms of technology that go straight from your device to low-Earth-orbit satellites.' But I think that's about 150 bucks a month, before we start worrying about calls. It's not cheap. But people say, 'It is absolutely fundamentally part of our occupational health and safety requirements in this area that we have a telephone service.'

We have a right to ask the telecommunications companies to abide by this, because they've got bucketloads of money from us to set up mobile phone towers and for the assets they hold when they sell it out of spectrum. In some areas, there's a virtual monopoly on the provision of a mobile phone service. There has to be mandatory compliance with the industry codes that have been set up. There has to be, as this talks to, a proper infringement process if people decide there's a buck to be made by not abiding by the rules.

It'll continue to be the case as you go to high-G delivery that you will need more mobile phone black spots. These areas will require a vastly greater rollout of mobile phone towers. Alternatively, you will have to come up with some program. Otherwise, Elon Musk will be the provider for regional areas, because people will just go across to Starlink. It's my great honour to represent the people of New England, and we've delivered around about 50 mobile black spot towers in places such as Balala, Bonshaw, Drake, Dungowan, Hillgrove, Kings Plains, Rocky Creek, Urbenville, Walcha Road, Woolomin, Attunga, Baraba, Bruxner Highway A and B, Tabulam, Duri, Elsmore, Fossickers Way, Hallsville, Invergowrie, Manilla, Moonbi, Mount Carrington, Oxley Vale, Piallamore, Spring Mountain Road near White Rock, Tamworth, Walcha, Westdale, Copeton Dam, Kingston, Baldersleigh, west of Guyra, Koreelah, Pinkett, Mount Hourigan, Doughboy Mountain, Moonan Flat, Torrington, Wellington Creek, Weabonga—up the hill from me—Spring Ridge, Blackville, Gilgai, Glen Elgin, Mole River Exchange, Tenterfield, Watsons Creek and Woodsreef Exchange.

As a regional member of parliament, some of the biggest things you can do are to get people a mobile phone tower. It's not that they want to do share transactions; they just want to know at Upper Horton that, if someone comes off a horse at the campdraft when it's on—and you've got 1,000 people or so there—and the person is suspected to have broken their neck, you can make the call straight away. People in regional areas have a right to be looked after. The question going forward is about making sure what we've seen from the telecommunications industry, which promised so much to us and to me—and maybe at that early age I was naive enough to believe promises. I got over that problem pretty quickly. But in 2005 I was naive enough to believe that, when people made promises to you, they would actually do them.

We're seeing this again. Now we're getting promises about energy. There's another raft of promises that to be frank, 20 years later, I just don't believe. I do not believe they will be able to maintain the grid in an affordable manner that will all work. I've seen this movie before, and it ends in absolute and utter tears. You end up with a complete fiasco, where people who have been able to swindle the government for whatever it was naive enough to have peeled off get it. The people left picking up the pieces are called constituents. No matter what, the government never turns up later on and fixes the problem. You're just left with a car crash that was a proper, working telecommunications platform where people could make phone calls. In the future, the next one will be, 'You didn't honestly believe we were going to have a working electricity grid, did you?' When we go back to them, we'll say, 'Hang on, these people got 3G, and you promised they would get 4G and 5G, but now they're getting "no G".' They have no G at all. They have no horses at all for this one. What went wrong here? Of course, the deal is done. They got the money. They'll say, 'That was fortuitous!'

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